Saturday, June 26, 2010

OOTW Blog Tour, Day 6: Jacket Knack and Scribbly Katia

Carol Brendler, versatile judging-books-by-their-covers correspondent on Jacket Knack,explores folk art images in light of Uma K..y's interview with artnavy on Saffron Tree. Urging the teaching of art appreciation to children, Uma remarks that the history of art is "the social, economic and political history of a particular era and civilisation. It does not happen in splendid isolation."

And on Scribbly Katia, Katia Novet Saint-Lot has posted adorable video footage of her daughter's class in the Indus International School in Hyderabad, India. The children listen to the teacher reading the book, join in the refrain, and answer a question or two about the story.

In the second video, the teacher's using the English text and including a literal Hindi translation of the refrain, rather than using Veena Shivpuri's Hindi translation, which is idiomatic rather than literal and may, moreover, be a little more complex than these Hindi as a Second Language learners would understand. So instead she's framing the construction of meaning in Hindi upon students' existing understanding of English.Speaking of construction, another analogy that keeps recurring, I spent my day hauling straw from the construction site of my friend Terry, who has just built a straw-bale outbuilding for herself.

Built! Much of it with her own hands! Look at those recycled bottles set into the wall. Makes the construction of fiction feel like a snap, trust me.

Terry's letting me take her leftover straw to mulch my seedlings, so I can trick this desert soil into retaining water. A reminder of how necessary green, growing things are to the air we breathe and the bodies we inhabit. Pure coincidence but that little nasturtium bloom is of a variety called "Empress of India".